Cold Welcome

Annotation:
Elizabeth Moon
COLD WELCOME
CHAPTER ONE
SLOTTER KEY NEARSPACE
DAY 1
Ky Vatta stared down at her home planet as her pinnace took her from Vanguard II, her flagship, to the lower-orbit space station where she would take a shuttle down to the surface. Once there, she would have to assume the role of Grand Admiral Vatta, homecoming hero of the recent war. But here, between the place she had made for herself—as founder and commander of Space Defense Force—and the welcome that awaited her, she had a short time to deal with her own feelings.
She did not want to be here. She did not want to be anywhere near Slotter Key. She felt nothing warm or sentimental about her home planet, the city she knew so well, or the lost home in which she had grown up. She did not want the good memories to rise, because with them would come the immediacy and certainty of loss.
No, she wanted to be very far away, on a completely different planet, where the only...